MARSEILLE, France – A flare-up in drug violence has left a 63-year-old man dead and another person badly wounded in the French port city of Marseille, a police source and a prosecutor said on Tuesday.

The senior and the wounded person are the latest victims of a turf war between drug dealers that has killed 17 people – mostly young men – since the start of the year in the crime-plagued north of the Mediterranean city, according to an AFP tally.

Neither victim was known to have had any previous involvement in the drug trade, the prosecutor’s office said.

The senior was shot in the chest overnight and had already died by the time medics arrived at the scene of the shooting near a fast-food outlet next to a drug-dealing point in the Busserine housing estate, the police source said.

The neighbourhood’s mayor, Ms Marion Bareille, said on Facebook that the man was a “collateral victim” of the violence.

The second victim, a man in his 30s, was gravely wounded in the back and lower limbs, the police source said.

The latest death follows that of an 18-year-old, who died on Sunday after being shot in the head as he sat on a sofa at the foot of a building known for drug dealing.

In March, the body of a man was found in the boot of a torched car in Busserine.

In 2022, 32 people were shot dead in gang violence in the wider Marseille region, including 28 in the city itself, according to the prosecutor’s office.

Of those 32 deaths, police said 30 were directly linked to “drug trafficking”. AFP